Intuition and the Creation of a Better World

Eco, Umberto

[On discussing unicorns with Adso, their existence or not, and their meaning.]

'The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of the body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind; it is the print of an idea. The idea is sign of things, and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not the body, the idea that others had of it.'

'And this is enough for you?'

'No, because true learning must be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth. And so I would like to go back from this print of a print to the individual unicorn that stands at the beginning of the chain ....'